Friday, July 22, 2011

A tribute to my friend, Jeff Schroeder

Tonight while washing baby bottles I pulled up cattle.com on my iPad and read Jeff's blog talking about how exactly 10 years ago tonight he registered simsteer.com, the online cattle game that essentially served as the springboard for many of Jeff''s excellent online ventures.

I then started thinking back to 2001, and got sentimental. I bet you didn't know this, but Jeff and I have been friends since 1996. We were both elected as Area FFA officers and met at the Texas FFA Camp at Trinidad, Texas. I'd estimate that there were probably about 100 high school students there, which at the time, were considered the cream of the crop from Texas FFA. Of all of the people at that camp, maybe like 3 or 4 actually stood out to me as people I remember today. Jeff was one of those. Funny how fate puts those people in your life and at the time, you have no idea how they'll become your friends later down the road.

We continued to cross paths occassionally while we were both students at A&M. I remember Jeff e-mailing me when I had just started doing web sites and talking to me about working together on web design and graphic design. This was when he had just started SimSteer.

Over the past 10 years, I've been able to work with Jeff on so many projects for lots of different clients like R.A. Brown, The Showbox, our Denver videos, and many more.

I just wanted to say a big congratulations to my friend, for his vision to create sites like Simsteer.com, cattle.com, and for all of the success he's found. Jeff, you're one of the best supporters of the cattle business and I'm proud to call you my colleague and friend.